Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Keep Abortion Legal (Even when it's not safe)

Remember the bad old days when abortion was illegal and back alley abortions killed thousands of women every year? You do? That's strange, since it isn't really true. But what about back alley abortionists who have practiced since abortion was made legal in Roe v. Wade?

Right now a trial is in progress on whether Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist, committed first degree murder of seven babies who were born alive and were killed by Gosnell ("ensuring fetal demise," he calls it). But you wouldn't know it if you had only the traditional news media to rely on.

State health officials knew about some of these as far back as 1979, and repeated complaints were made, but nothing was ever done. Where were the people like those at Planned Parenthood who talk about keeping abortion safe and legal? They were nowhere to be seen.

They guy isn't even an OB/GYN. But he plied his grisly trade for three decades in West Philadelphia, where, according to some of his own employees, 40 percent of his abortions were performed on women over 24 weeks pregnant, as health officials looked the other way. Now that a trial is exposing just how inhuman his practices were, it is now the media's turn to avert its gaze.

Abortion being a secular sacrament, it's not hard to understand why this would be.

Here's Kirsten Powers at the Daily Beast on the media blackout of Gosnell's atrocities:

I can only think of a handful of times in my eight years as a Fox News contributor that I’ve discussed abortion. The people who obsessively cover it and anything vaguely related to it are those in the mainstream media and in the left-wing media, which is why their silence on this is so remarkable. Mollie Hemingway did yeoman’s work chronicling how faithfully The Washington Post’s health reporter, who covered Todd Aiken, the Susan G. Komen controversy, and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, didn’t write a single story on the Gosnell trial. No abortion regulation is too small for the mainstream media to cover; no stupid comment about abortion by any Republican goes unnoticed. So her disinterest in this trial is inexplicable.

But while the left has alternately attacked the right for its alleged lack of interest and for paying too much of the “wrong sort” of attention, I haven’t heard a lot about the near silence from the feminist organizations that lecture us endlessly about how they stand for women’s health. I find the claims now that feminists were deeply upset about poor minority women being abused and killed along with their babies a little tough to believe. A search for “Gosnell” on NOW's website yielded only two hits, both from 2011. Search for “Gosnell” on the League of Women Voters website and you will find nothing. The same search on the NARAL and Planned Parenthood sites returned the same number of hits: zero.